The Middle Class Without The Welfare State

In place of the old liberal hegemony, with its groups and group antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

If the poor can thrive, as we have seen, without the supervision and the resources of the welfare state, why not the middle class? Indeed, it is the middle class that bears the moral responsibility for the entitlement state and its promises that cannot be kept, debt that cannot be paid, and a course that cannot continue. We middle-class people rather like the well-worn paths of the welfare state; it saves us the bother of making our own way. All we need to do is keep up a good report card and we can fall into the middle-class entitlements when our turn comes. Social Security? Better than relying on the stock market. Medicare? Better than the bother of making decisions about your own health care. Education? Who has time, with today’s two-income families, to volunteer at the neighborhood school?

Modern middle-class Americans might be excused for thinking that life is just school writ large, for our highly organized childhoods teach us exactly that. We all troop off to school, to the government’s child-custodial facility, from Kindergarten to 12th Grade, boys and girls, to prepare for the working world. Should we? There’s a telling commentary on all this that we learned from the slave drivers and the manufacturers of the early industrial revolution in an earlier chapter. They found it difficult to break post-pubertal males to “industrial discipline.” Is that what modern schooling is all about? Boys have never done well at sitting still, and have always gone unwillingly to school. Modern schooling does seem to require remarkable obedience and conformity from the children; maybe the economy couldn’t work unless pre-pubertal males are all broken to the culture of conformity in a necessary preparation for work in the post-industrial work-place. Dare we ask the uncomfortable question whether humans in general are more than bums on seats graduating from classroom to classroom in the child custodial facility of life?

If the welfare state is bad for the poor, by teaching them dependency and the low cunning needed to pass through the benefit stations of the via dependencia, it must be even worse for the middle class. At least the poor learn something on the street about how to outwit the Man. The middle class can easily become deracinated, losing the basic culture of the middle class that has obtained since the Axial Age religions first invented the idea of the “responsible self.” The temptation for the poor is to sink to a culture of low cunning; the temptation for the middle class is to live life as an inmate in an institution, starting at school, the government child-custodial facility, continuing on a “career” working in big bureaucracies for the system, and then ending in a senior planned community — really, a luxury barracks — in man-made Florida or Arizona.

If welfare dependency for the poor is a kind of addictive drug, the middle-class life in the welfare state is a form of social sterilization, and the living proof is the remarkable lack of fecundity in welfare state females. Simply stated, middle class people work too much and commune too little; we spend too much time as wage slaves at the business park and too little time socializing in the community, living a life in common with our families, our neighbors, and our communities. It all starts with the standard middle-class welfare-state benefits.

In today’s America the average business-park salaryman does not earn a wage. He gets take-home pay, the monies left over after he and his employer have paid taxes to pay for the government pension, the government old-age health care, the government unemployment tax, and the government work-place disability premium. And that is before the employer’s deductions for a 401k pension plan, health insurance, dental insurance, and disability insurance. All these taxes and deductions amount to forced savings against the common vicissitudes of life, and very worthy they are. They also amount to forced sterilization, because the salaryman in question does not have beneficial ownership of his forced savings, not yet. Suppose he wants to buy a house. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for him to access his savings and thus reduce the necessary mortgage? Suppose he wants to start a business? Isn’t that the whole purpose of savings? Suppose he wants to go back to school? It would be nice to apply the unemployment insurance part of his forced savings to his school fees and his living expenses. But he can’t, because the government in its wisdom and the employer in his cunning, have sequestered the salaryman’s savings away — as an insurance against reckless or independent action.

You can see the government’s interest in all this. It can take the forced savings and spend it on buying votes until the salaryman needs it decades later. You can see the employer’s interest. He would like the worker to work and not spend time on non-work-related activities like financial and health-care planning and management. He would also like the worker not to bother his silly little head about setting up in business — perhaps in competition with his former employer.

All of which is to say that perhaps, in spite of 200 years of political propaganda, the yoke of the factory system has fallen hardest on the shoulders, not of the manual worker, but on the middle-class knowledge worker, disciplined, controlled, confined, as perhaps no factory hand in the 19th century or slave on a sugar island had to be. For let us not forget the words of the slave drivers and the factory bosses, that post-pubertal males could not be made to submit to the gang system or to factory discipline. We need our government school system to create the submissive personality suited for work as a human cog in a large bureaucratic system.

In this book, a manifesto for modern conservatism, we have appealed more than normal to writers from the left. We have done this following the injunction of F.S.C. Northrop in his Meeting of East and West at the beginning of a chapter on German Idealism.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional modern French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.1

It is one thing for conservatives to appeal to Edmund Burke and the good old days of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu. Conservatives are already persuaded by the conservative Enlightenment. But arguments based on Burke and Co. do nothing to persuade the modern ruling class, which regards the culture and philosophy of the American founders to be “shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.” Anyway, they were slave owners! The modern ruling class rose in the 19th century, as we have seen, as an intellectual movement that replaced the Enlightenment agenda of freedom and limited government with the idea, from various critiques of capitalism, that a strong government was needed to right the wrongs of the industrial system or at least to mitigate its harshness. But now, as we have seen, new generations of critics have arisen to apply the same critique to big government, both from right and left. Conservatives are familiar with the critiques from the right. There was Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism in the 1920s to argue that socialism was impossible because it could not compute prices. There was F.A. Hayek in the 1940s making the bandwidth argument that the man from Whitehall or Washington could not know more or outperform the millions of producers and consumers. There were James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock with The Calculus of Consent in the 1960s making the argument that government legislation by majority rule always tended towards exploitation and rent-seeking unless constrained by a rule of unanimous consent. Peter Berger and John Neuhaus argued in To Empower People for a middle ground of mediating institutions between the megastructures of big business and big government. Modern conservatives, following Edmund Burke, argue for a social space of civil society between the dominating systems of the modern Bigs. But the ruling class of educated liberals has rejected the conservative critique, by ignoring its thinkers and by demonizing its reform politicians and their policies.

Now comes ahe critique of the welfare state from the left. As we have seen, the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists found that both big government and big capitalism tended to be dominating, with Jürgen Habermas contrasting the domination of system with the collaborative space of communicative action. Left-wing radicals like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their radical Empire trilogy argued for a multitude of “singularities” living a “life in common” of creative production and “affect” that was now replacing the masses of working-class factory workers doing standardized and routine work. James C. Scott has illuminated modern government as an effort to make individuals “legible” to government, and thereby taxable and controllable. It is one thing for our ruling class to ignore the attack on the welfare state from the right; it is another thing to ignore the critique of the welfare state developed by left-wing writers.

This critique attempts to transcend the arguments of both left and right. In the analysis of modern government in Chapter Two and modern business in Chapter Three we have attempted to expose the original sin of both modern government and modern business. Both are seduced, more than they can bear to admit, by the sirens of system, of force, and domination. The fact is that modern government is founded upon the successful effort of the absolute monarchs to penetrate the mediating structures of the early modern period, the guilds and confraternities, in order to make their subjects individually legible, taxable, and controllable. Nothing much has changed since then on the governance front, except for the worse. The fact is that modern business is founded upon the successful effort of slave drivers and factory owners to bend humans to the gang system and so-called “industrial discipline.” Admittedly there has been a change in the last two centuries: the slave driver’s cowskin whip has been confiscated, although it made a surprise farewell tour in the 20th century in the lands of communism and fascism, and survives in the miserable hell-holes of the thug dictators. The power of the factory boss has been softened. But not by much, and often not for any noble reason but the practical one that businessmen have discovered that profits are bigger when workers are fat and happy rather than cringing under the infernal speedup of Taylorism. They have learned, with the German generals, that the best workers are “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility” and much more productive than the shuffling squads of proletarians in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Long ago, the 20th century’s great Willa Cather posed the problem of the conformist middle class in The Professor’s House. Professor Godfrey St. Peter was an adventurous soul in his youth. But then came love for Lillian, and “because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary.” The only outlet for adventure was to write about it in a chilly attic, in his multi-volume “Spanish Adventurers in North America.” Then came into his life Tom Outland, an unschooled boy without a high-school diploma looking to enroll at Hamilton College. Tom, orphaned as a baby, actually had lived life as an adventurer, and in a year’s work cowpunching in New Mexico had discovered a priceless lost cliff city of the pueblo Indians, a fictional equivalent of the ruins in Mesa Verde National Park. Tom gets into college after four months cramming his mathematics, and later makes a patentable discovery as a physicist that makes them all wealthy. Except that Tom goes off to Europe with the Father Duchene that had taught him Virgil and dies in World War I. Who is the eminent Professor St. Peter? Is he an educated scholar, or really just another mere mass man leading Thoreau’s life of quiet desperation?

Ever since the coming-out of Reason in the French Revolution men have been asking whether it is possible to escape Reason’s domination. It seems that despite Horkheimer and Adorno’s warning that what men want from nature is to dominate it and other men, the real danger is that the systems that men design so they may dominate nature turn around and end up dominating them. So humans have sought liberation in Romanticism, in socialism, in environmentalism. It is provocative that precisely the age in which man has dominated nature woman has emerged from subservience and privacy into the public square. Is this because Man’s domination of nature has freed women from the yoke of nature’s oppression or is it because it has freed women from the patriarchy’s oppression? Alternatively it may be that the dominatory and disciplinary culture of modern government and modern industry has pressed upon the brow of men none other than the age-old crown of thorns taken suddenly off the collective brow of womanhood.

If we desire emancipation from the culture of compulsion we must also liberate ourselves from the systems that dominate us. We must, following Habermas, balance the power of system with the discourse ethics of the communicative lifeworld, the German Lebenswelt that translates into the Anglo-Saxon civil society.

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy. Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...David Martin, On Secularization

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America